But what if I don’t want want to use the full name? It would sound somewhat stilted if I wrote:

I was chatting with Richard Rutter the other day…

When you work alongside someone every day, it sounds downright weird to always refer to them by their full name. It’s much more natural for me to write:

I was chatting with Richard the other day…

I would still make his name a hyperlink but what can I do about making this text into an hCard? Should I change my writing style and refer to everyone by their full formated name even if the context and writing style would favour just using their first name?

Now a parser will have to do some extra legwork to find the formated name within the title attribute of the abbr element rather than in the text between the opening and closing tags of whatever element has a class of “fn”. But that’s okay. That’s all part of the microformats philosophy:

Designed for humans first and machines second

Specifically, humans who publish first, machines that parse second.

If I were to link off to Richard’s site from here, I’d also combine my microformats: hCard + XFN: